Making Learning Fun

As frequent readers know, we homeschool and love it! Part of the reason we love it is because we try to make learning enjoyable. Learning truly is exciting but about everything can be presented in boring ways too. We too struggle with a little bit of burn out once in a while in one area or another so when that happens it is time to get creative and figure out how to make it fun again!

Here are some ways we have been making learning fun around here lately:

• Following our interests/passions. I told about how Jonathan has been doing that in yesterday's post.
• Having a month of Alphabet Adventures again. We had a blast with this 2 years ago and we decided it would be fun to do it again. We are working on a new letter every day (though not weekends or holidays) and we try to incorporate that in every part of our lives from dressing to eating, Bible Memorization, singing, books and art and much more! For Megan (age 3) this is helping her to learn the letters, for Aaron (6) it is helping him to relate letters and sounds together in preparation for reading and for Jonathan (8) I am hoping the review of letters and sounds might help with his spelling. As for Mara (10) she is having fun with helping with the cooking, art work and is learning new verses. I am hoping to do a post each Saturday with some of our highlights from each week.
• Traveling and exploring educational places. Our trip to North Carolina was definitely a learning time!
• Visiting the Library. We went to the Library yesterday and again I realized how blessed we are to have all of that available to us at no cost! Yesterday we had a normal day of checking out books and came home with 50 of them. The librarian entertained himself by counting how many books we had while checking them out. He decided their numbers were up at the library because of people like us. Anyway.... while were are there I usually tell the kids they can pick out around 7 books. Mara picks out chapter books, Jonathan a mixture of those and kids books and the younger two pick out kids books, meanwhile I look over the non-fiction children's section and pick out a large selection of biographies, scientific books, geography, history, literature, art and more. Even though my kids don't necessarily pick them out on their own they love to read them when I bring them home. Some we read together and some they read on their own. This time I also picked out a couple of educational videos which they were very excited about (Ken and I always chuckle over what our kids will sit and watch -things most kids and some adults would consider dry - but our kids love them because that is pretty much the only time they watch anything).
• Learning from CDs. Recently we received our homeschool order from Christian Book Distributors and in that I got a CD that has two abridged and dramatically read works of Shakespeare and also a CD with music and story about George Frederic Handel. Both of them my kids have really enjoyed but yet they have gotten in literature, history and music while listening to them.
• Another thing we ordered which the kids have enjoyed is some Mathematical learning wrap ups. The boys have had fun playing (and learning) with them.

Making learning fun really works for us! Just to clarify this doesn't mean we don't work or need to be diligent- that is extremely important too, but work can and should be fun and being diligent can be enjoyed as well!